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Roaming Shores to meet with utility after repeated outages; council weighs trimming, equipment upgrades
Summary
Council members said repeated outages—often linked to tree interference and aging local equipment—prompted a scheduled meeting with the village’s utility representative; officials discussed trimming, transformer capacity and the high cost of undergrounding lines.
Roaming Shores council members raised recurring electrical outages and voted to pursue follow‑up meetings with the village’s utility representative to examine causes and remediation options.
The Mayor said he has scheduled a meeting with the village’s Illuminating Company representative (identified in meeting remarks as Wendy Zel) and asked council to send staff and at least one impacted resident to attend. The village expects the meeting to cover trouble spots on the east side of the lake where outages have been most frequent.
Council and staff recounted recent outages and said overgrown or dead trees on private lots that sit behind homes have been a major contributor. Staff noted First Energy and contracted crews (Davy Tree referenced) have trimmed rights‑of‑way but that many problematic trees are on private property behind houses. Council members flagged transformer capacity in some neighborhoods (Jefferson Point referenced) as another constraint that may require utility investment.
Options discussed included additional targeted trimming, use of contractor crews, and the expensive option of running lines underground. Staff cautioned that undergrounding is technically feasible but substantially more costly and that homeowners are typically responsible for the line from the roadside to the house. Council members asked administrators to bring utility representatives and a cost/feasibility overview back to a future meeting.
Council also discussed right‑of‑way cleanup in several locations and confirmed the village’s cleanup day scheduled for early May. A resident who has been repeatedly affected (named in the record as Ben Fraser) will attend the utility meeting to describe outage impacts firsthand.
The council did not authorize specific capital spending at the meeting; instead it set a next step to meet with the utility representative and collect options and cost estimates.
